The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine Reviews
A beautiful, fantastically enjoyable adventure, and a bittersweet goodbye to Geralt of Rivia.
If this turns out to be Geralt’s last adventure, it’s a worthy end
Our review of Hearts of Stone mentioned that it was a shining example of how to create meaningful downloadable content, and yet Blood and Wine manages to top it in nearly every way imaginable.
What’s the saying? “Old witchers never die, they just fade away.” Something like that. One thing’s for certain: The Witcher 3 is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, and Blood and Wine is a fitting capstone not only on it but on the whole series. I’ll miss it.
In the end, The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine is a worthy addition to this franchise that once again makes you appreciate what an amazing game CD Projekt has created. Unlike many games that feature a static world or those that use smoke and mirrors, The Witcher 3 is quite dynamic and it feels like a living breathing universe and Blood and Wine really expands on this.
I'm not even done with this new content, and there’s that enticing New Game + option, along with the 100 level cap, and plenty of decisions and a different ending I never experienced in the vanilla game, but even so it saddens me to know this is it, for now, with the adventures of Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf.
Blood and Wine is an expansion to raise a glass to.
If you're already a fan of The Witcher, there's no reason why Blood and Wine shouldn't have a place in your collection.
The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine signals the end of CD Projekt Red’s adventures in master-crafting an engrossing story and the exceptional world building that has been portrayed in The Witcher 3 and its last expansion.
Blood and Wine is every bit as good as you would want Geralt’s final adventure to be.
Blood and Wine won't change your opinion of Wild Hunt.
Between its primary plot and side content, “Blood and Wine” can easily add a couple dozen hours to your overall time in The Witcher 3. Complete with its own twisting narrative, branching mission paths and endings, unique enemy types and – it has to be said again – GORGEOUS landscape, Toussaint is a fitting capping point for the amazing journey that this game has been. There’s a reason it took out top billing in Stevivor’s (and my personal) game of the year rankings. I can’t think of a better way to send off our time with Geralt than an expansion of this magnitude – except perhaps never sending him off at all.
The second addition to The Witcher 3 is to say goodbye to the series, at least for a while. The idea of visiting Toussaint turned out to be a hit and an effective way to close a chapter.
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To spend my final moments here was quite fitting – the darkness laying just beneath a dazzling surface, the vast threads meeting to create either your happy ending or your bittersweet reminders and the adventures small and large that led there. It has been a life well lived, and if there are to be no more adventures, then a villa in Toussaint doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
CD Projekt Red has raised the bar on what it takes to make a high quality story driven RPG. They did not fail to deliver on Geralt’s final tale either. If this is our last hurrah with the White Wolf it was time well spent.
It was inevitable that The Witcher 3 would close on a high, but few will have expected what they’ll find in Blood & Wine. While unrequited love, barrels of red with a blackberry aroma, and excessive amounts of pomp may not be what you think you want from The Witcher, it won’t be long until you’ve changed your mind.
Blood & Wine is an experience that is truly bittersweet. This is the hallmark of a studio at its peak, wholly confident and with nothing left to prove, but also still committed to delivering an expansion that’s more generous with its content than some full games – and which is good enough to be a Game of the Year contender in its own right.
A triumphant return to the world of the Witcher and the most fitting of farewells. Blood and Wine is the swansong the franchise so richly deserves. An epic tale worthy of greatest theatres and even Dandelion himself!
If you are a fan of the original Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and feel the need to embark on a new journey, there is certainly a lot here to offer with Blood and Wine. The large-sized new area, dying armor, and the incorporation of mutations present a sufficient amount of new gameplay elements to play around with. However, it is the thirty hours of new adventures tied in with the amount of new quests and point of interests that will get players back into the game. Blood and Wine even offers a dynamic point of interest system that will affect the number of enemies in a certain area based on your actions. With the game being standalone, it could sell by itself. Being able to import a previous character, however, will certainly bring a lot to the table for fans of the series as The Witcher 3’s core gameplay is still in tact.
In a time where an expansion pack is regularly nothing more than a new map or a couple of character gadgets, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine brings us something hearty and filling enough to prove that there's hope for DLC yet. Geralt's adventure in stunning Toussaint is an absolute triumph.